Reborn As An Overpowered Villain

Lucien closed the book he had been reading, though it was nothing more than a re-reading of a volume he had already finished before he had even reached the age of twelve. The book concerned the history of the world, and he had only wanted to make sure he had not missed some clue to the future impending doom.

And after reading it completely from start to finish, he had gotten nothing of use. In truth, he had known all the history written in the book from the back of his mind, the knowledge settled deep and clear owing to the vigorous study of his childhood, a period during which he had thrown himself into as many subjects as he could because he had wanted to improve himself in every regard. So, the history was nothing new to him; he could recall it all without effort.

As a matter of fact, the history itself was not well documented at all. The written records only accounted for the era of the Hero King, which was three thousand years ago. What had happened before that was not simply unknown but rather erased, or so Lucien wanted to believe, because even though he had skimmed the greater part of his home's library, he had found almost nothing pertaining to the world that had existed before the Hero King's birth.

The prevailing theory behind this absence of documentation was that the world had been very primal and raw in those ages, that the people of that era had not been advanced like those of today. But that theory had been thoroughly rejected following the discovery of fossils and artifacts and tools so sophisticated that even the present world would struggle to construct them. The most compelling theory to emerge from those findings was that the world had in fact been tremendously advanced before the Hero King's birth, the point from which history books mostly chose to begin.

Something had happened, then. Something had stripped that previous civilization down to nothing, leaving barely enough survivors to crawl out alive, and with their own desperate struggle and effort those survivors had built a new civilization. But many of the technologies, the methods, the accumulated knowledge had been lost along the way, and all records of the old world had been destroyed alongside it.

Even in the story Lucien had read in his previous life, very little was ever said about the time before the Hero King's birth. It could not have been possible that people had simply emerged a few centuries before the hero king’s birth, could it? Humanity had existed for tens of thousands of years, surely, and the fact that recorded history began conveniently at the Hero King's birth was something every serious intellect had questioned. Yet the fossils recovered so far had not been enough to truly gauge how truly advanced the previous civilization was, well it was to some degree believed it was more advanced than today’s world but the extent to which it was advanced was not known. But, the question still remained as to why in the world they fell despite having such advancement.

Previously Lucien would have no answer to it, but he knew some answers to it now, after having recovered his past life's memories.

Piecing together the knowledge from his previous life where he had read the book in which he was currently living in and the manner in which this world was supposed to meet its end, the missing records only reinforced a single conclusion: that previous civilization must have been destroyed by the same world-ending doom that was approaching again in the future. And for whatever reason, that civilization had managed to save the world from its end, but doing so had cost them everything, leaving only a scattered handful of survivors to carry humanity forward. Why only a handful left, because if half the civilization had survived the technologies and knowledge would have survived to this day and the current world would have been much more advanced.

Lucien rubbed his temples, a deep discomfort settling behind his eyes, because the artifacts and tools recovered from that old civilization had been genuinely shocking. Some were so advanced and so highly ranked that they topped the charts of the current power hierarchy, and some were still partially functional. As for those that were fully functional, Lucien was fairly certain people had quietly hidden them away for their own use, because he had never come across a fully intact artifact among the publicly documented findings, and he believed it to the core of his being that someone had kept the functioning artefact for themselves.

But the unsettling nature of that vanished civilization was not the only thing weighing on him. The Hero King's journey had been nothing short of miraculous in its own right, and it only brought Lucien even more trouble on how to believe it.

The Hero King had supposedly been born a commoner, and even within the history books it was made clear that nobility and commoners existed as distinct classes, yet the Hero King had risen to the highest ranks so rapidly that his growth had been entirely unprecedented.

The Hero King had never lost a single official duel in all of recorded history. He had been blessed by the God of War. And what was even more unsettling was that his name was not known at all. Most people had come to believe he had not truly been born of a commoner family, and that he had not truly been born at all in the conventional sense, but had rather emerged into the world already a young man, as though conjured from mana itself.

Just thinking about this tangled mess of a history made Lucien want to burn the book into ashes, because the story read so much like gibberish and fabrication that he could hardly suppress the urge to laugh at it.

But the Hero King's miracles did not end with his origins alone. There were things that were even more unsettling than his birth.

***

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